Botany major Buster mistakenly graduates in electrical engineering and is hired to wire a new home. He installs lots of fanciful gadgets. The one who should have received the degree gets even by rewiring all the gadgets to wreak havoc.

Buster is thrown off a train near an amusement park. There he gets a job in a shooting gallery run by the Blinking Buzzards mob. Ordered to kill a businessman, he winds up protecting the man and his daughter by outfitting their home with trick devices.

Buster is a bank clerk. Overturned glue gets everything, mostly the money, stuck to everything else. When robbers show up he can't "stick 'em up" because his hands are stuck in his pockets. The robbers' hideout is a haunted house designed to scare off police.

Buster is playing golf with Sybil when he gets knocked out. An escaped prisoner changes clothes with him. Buster goes to prison and learns that he is to be hanged. He changes clothes with a guard just as prisoner Roberts attacks all the guards.

Buster's handmade boat, The Damfino, is finished and is, of course, too large to get through the basement door. When he drives off with it in tow, the side of his house, then the whole thing, collapses. At the harbor he rides the boat out only to have it sink beneath him. The rest is a series of adventures he and his family have with the restored boat.

The opening scene, a dream sequence prior to the vaudeville routines which follow, is what makes this film famous. In it Keaton plays everyone in a theatre simultaneously (through multiple exposures). He is the band leader, all its members, the dancers on the stage and everyone in the audience.

Buster bids goodbye to Virginia and all women, sailing away in his "Cupid." Later, without food or water, he is taken on board "The Love Nest" which has a very mean captain. A crewman who spills coffee on the captain's hand is thrown overboard. So is anyone else who bothers the captain.

Through a series of mistaken identities Buster winds up with a load of furniture in the middle of parade of policemen. An anarchist's bomb lands in his carriage. After lighting his cigarette with it, he tosses it into the ranks of police. When it explodes the police chase him all over town.

Farmhands Keaton and Roberts share a cottage full of mechanical devices for making life easy. They are rivals for the farmer's daughter. Keaton , disguised as a scarecrow, causes troubles for his rival and the farmer. When Keaton stoops to tie his shoe, the girl accepts what she thinks is his kneeling proposal.

Buster and Sybil exit a chapel as newlyweds. Among the gifts is a portable house you easily put together in one week. It doesn't help that Buster's rival for Sybil switches the numbers on the crates containing the house parts.

When Selby arrives as the new ranch owner, he is assumed to be just another cowboy attracted to Ann Hepburn so he takes a job as a dude cowhand. He learns cattle are being rustled and he suspects the boss Sam Hepburn. But Hepburn suspects the foreman Hyslip and when he catches him with the goods, Hyslip shoots him. Hyslip then blames the new dude, and sends his men out to kill him.